B Is for Beer by Tom Robbins

objected.
    “That ’s where your uncle ’s hops come in. While the mash is being cooked, before it ’s strained out of the sugar-heavy water and disposed of, hop petals or else pellets made from compressed hop flowers (the pellets look exactly like pet-store hamster food, by the way) are dumped into the tanks. Hops reduce the sweetness of the mixture and add flavor and aroma.
    Without hops, Redhook and Budweiser would be little more than cloudy sugar water.
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    “Okay, then, we ’ve added our hops, but, Gracie, we still don’t have beer. Instead we have a tank of flavored liquid the brewers refer to as wort .”
    “Ooo.” Gracie made a face. “My cousin had a wart on his behind.”
    “That ’s something altogether different.”
    “Well, it ’s still kind of an ugly word.”
    “I guess I’d have to agree. Malt and mash and hops and yeast aren’t exactly puffs of pure poetry, either. For that matter, the English word beer itself (evolved from the older word beor ) is not the most musical little tittle of elegant language ever to roll off a tongue. However, as Shakespeare once said…”
    “Who’s that?”
    “A famous guy who wrote a lot about fairies. You’ll read him someday. Knowing you, you’ll probably act—and try to steal a scene or two—in one of his plays. Shakespeare said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
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    “What ’s that mean?”
    “It means that if beer had been called champagne , holy water, or potassium cyanide , it would be no more—or no less—
    wonderful. It also means that if your name was Gertrude or Hortense or Annabella, you’d be just as pretty, just as sensitive, just as lively and curious—and just as much a pain in the butt—as you are when your name is Gracie. Now for goodness sake, child, let ’s get on with it!”
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    13
    It ’s rather obvious that Gracie and the Beer Fairy were touring a brewery. Right? In this brewery, as in every brewery, there would have been men working: busy brewers all over the place. Right? Yet the men had failed to take the slightest notice of the presence in their midst of a strange little girl in a vomit-stained birthday dress with a ginger-haired, gossamer-gowned “dragonfly” on her shoulder. Right? But being smart, you’ve guessed (correctly) that Gracie and the fairy couldn’t be observed, were invisible to the men due to the fact that they were on the Other Side of the Seam. Right?
    Or, if you didn’t figure that out on your own, your grandpa surely pointed it out to you—provided he ’s still hanging in there with you, which he may well be since your grandpa, after so many, many experiences of reading you bedtime stories about talking choo-choo trains, teddy bear picnics, and the hardships of young Abe Lincoln, stories that surely made his teeth feel squeaky and his eyelids droop like coffin covers, well, he must have jumped at the chance to read you a book about beer ; must have been so enthused that he poured himself a tall frosty one before he began—and if Grandma hasn’t been checking on him, perhaps a couple more by Chapter 13. Right?
    It wouldn’t be unusual. That ’s often the way it is with beer.
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    That ’s the way it is with beer, but so far we ’ve encountered no actual beer in this brewery. Rather, the tour has stalled before some huge tanks of warm water, flavored (heavily at some breweries, lightly at this one) with malt and hops.
    (It may be worth mentioning here that the water used in brewing also contributes to the character of beer: for example, hard water—water with a lot of mineral content, such as that in Ireland—lends a muscular nature to a stout brew like Guinness, while softer, less mineral-laced water such as that for which the Czech Republic is famous, produces the paler, crisper style of beer known worldwide as pilsner or lager .) At any rate, at this point the Beer Fairy, growing a tad